The Taipei District Court yesterday detained four importers who allegedly bribed customs officials to allow them to import illegal goods or pay lower tariffs by undervaluing their imports.
The four suspects imported banned daily necessities hidden in containers carrying legal products, prosecutors in Taipei said.
A day earlier, 216 investigators raided 39 locations, including several customs offices, and questioned 29 officials and people suspected of paying bribes.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
The investigation was launched last year after the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office was tipped off about suspected “price haggling” over the phone between a broker and a Keelung customs official.
The investigators later found that many Directorate-General of Customs and Keelung office officials were involved in covering up the smuggling of banned goods.
They also discovered that brokers used bribes to curry favor with the officials, who would help importers of fish products, liquor and chocolate evade tariffs or pay lower tariffs by underestimating the values of their imports.
In one incident, a customs official asked a broker why his container of products was valued at such a small sum of money and the broker requested the official to lower his estimate.
Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der (李述德), meanwhile, pledged on Wednesday to get to the bottom of the bribery claims, which allegedly involve senior customs officials, 28 other civil servants and businesspeople.
“If the allegations turn out to be true, we will definitely get to the bottom of it and we will not be lenient with the suspects,” Lee said.
The most senior suspect in this case is Directorate-General of Customs Deputy Director General Lu Tsai-yih (呂財益), who is scheduled to retire soon.
Lee said he was seeking a replacement for the deputy director general, one of the key conditions being “integrity.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching